


But through the death of some of her

by Naraht



Category: Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: 1940s, Angst, Body Horror, F/M, Gen, Medical Trauma, Mother-in-Law/Daughter-in-Law Relationship, Motherhood, Postpartum Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2015-04-04
Packaged: 2018-03-21 06:45:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3682008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hilary, six weeks postpartum.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But through the death of some of her

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Makioka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Makioka/gifts).



_Postnatal depression_ , thought Hilary, lying in bed.

A successful diagnosis usually brought her a thrill of pride improved upon only by the delights of surgery, but Hilary could feel no self-congratulation now, only a sense of sinking ever deeper into greyness and horror. Acknowledging the fact gained her nothing. There was no operation that could cure her: therefore she could not imagine ever recovering.

In her second trimester an X-ray had revealed that Hilary, who had begun to be alarmed by her size, was carrying twins. Months of bed rest had followed. She had successfully carried the babies to thirty-five weeks, which one could consider an achievement of sorts, but the ensuing labour had been lengthy, exhausting, and in the end fruitless.

Her abdomen now bore the unmistakeable vertical scar of a Caesarean section. As major surgeries went, hardly worthy of special note. She could have performed one herself without thinking twice. But when the dressing was first changed she had found herself averting her gaze from the livid incision bisecting her own soft flesh, shocked by the feeling of helpless violation it brought upon her. It would be visible to the end of her days.

"Aren't you wearing your jacket?" said Elaine, having swept into the bedroom as if it were her own. "You'll catch cold."

"I won't catch cold," said Hilary dully. 

The room was heated to a temperature suitable for the most delicate of invalids; she could not imagine that the incubator in which the twins had spent their first week of life had been any warmer, though merely being six weeks postpartum did not mean that she was ill. The bed-jacket hung reproachfully discarded over a nearby chair, crocheted of the finest, softest angora; the twins wore hats and jackets of a matching wool. On newborn babies the effect was charming; on Hilary it was - or would have been - close to geriatric.

"But anyway," she added. "It doesn't fit."

"It was entirely my error," said Elaine. "Very unobservant of me. I thought I had allowed for your... condition. Clearly I was mistaken."

Before her pregnancy it would have fit amply. Now, even if her waistline had fully recovered, - which it emphatically had not - the jacket would have been impossible to pull closed across her breasts, which seemed to Hilary to belong to a different woman entirely. She had not taken measurements, and would have died sooner than let Elaine do so.

"I shall start another," added Elaine.

"I'll be back at work soon," Hilary said, the contradiction implicit.

Elaine looked to one side at Hilary, with an air of well-bred contempt, as though Hilary had suggested that she were planning to climb Everest on the Sunday. "I should think it was far too early to consider. After all, your first duty is to be well for your babies and your husband. You mustn't unsettle yourself thinking of work, with your nerves as they are."

Tears of anger and helpless frustration pricked at Hilary's eyes. She turned her head away on the pillow. She did not say, and Elaine would not understand, that returning to work was the only thing she thought worth living for. Slender hope though it might be in her current state. 

From her comfortable, darkened room, with Elaine Fleming straightening the bedsheets around her, Hilary's whole life appeared a remorseless series of failures. A failed surgeon, that much was certain. Everything afterwards had only been by way of compensation and nothing could measure up to that first dream. A failed woman, in the eyes of her mother and sisters at least; her late marriage to Julian could only, in the eyes of the world, seem the grasping of desperation. Though she had succeeded in bearing Julian's children - a pregnancy she would never have wanted, had he not begged her to conceive a child during the last fading days of her fertility - it had taken the last of her strength. And now came this endless, killing despair. 

She was forty-two. She could not have more children and she could not imagine raising the two that she had borne. She had given Julian what he wanted, sacrificed her health and her career for him, and she could give nothing else. The presence of Elaine Fleming in her own home, keeping house for her son because his wife no longer could, was merely the final indignity. How much better if she had died in childbirth and left Julian free to marry again. She knew very well that it was what Elaine would have wanted.

It was only some tenuous, irrational pride that kept Hilary from sobbing. She gathered herself with an effort of will that seemed, in the moment, as titanic as that which had carried her through medical school and into the Royal College of Surgeons.

"I've just been looking at these letters from nannies," she said. "Some of them seem very well qualified."

The stack of applications - Julian had placed an advert in the _Times_ \- had been sitting on her side table for several days now, demanding attention. Hilary had meant to start through them yesterday but had achieved nothing more demanding than reading twenty pages of her favourite Robert Templeton novel, which she had already read twice since the beginning of her bed rest. Julian, in the midst of rehearsals, would certainly do nothing about them. And Elaine, who had seen her chance to get her claws into Julian for the first time since his marriage nearly ten years earlier, was in her element.

"Julian asked after you at breakfast this morning," she said, ignoring Hilary's statement. "He really is very concerned about your health."

She spoke as if her son were merely a sympathetic acquaintance who had happened to hear the unfortunate news, rather than Hilary's husband and the father of her children.

If it had not been for his punishing rehearsal schedule Hilary knew that Julian would have spent every moment by her side, whether she had asked him or not. He might even have been a comfort. But at six weeks postpartum, she was also only too aware she had reached the point at which she routinely advised other women that they could safely resume marital relations. 

The prospect, frankly, appalled her. If Julian never touched her again, it would be too soon. It was just as well that he was not hanging about the place. She could not bear the implications of his loving, hopeful gaze, nor the thought of yet another needy being at her breast.

Sadly Elaine was not so easy to dismiss.

"It's been kind of you to stay as long as you have," said Hilary, "but I'm sure we won't presume upon you much longer. Once we've found a nanny..."

"Of course," said Elaine Fleming, "I shall stay for as long as my son needs me."

 _Forever_ , thought Hilary. It needed no qualification.

***

"In the dark womb where I began  
My mother’s life made me a man.  
Through all the months of human birth  
Her beauty fed my common earth.  
I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir,  
But through the death of some of her."

\- John Masefield

**Author's Note:**

> Is this the alternate ending to "In that dark womb"? Would this be the story of the birth of Oliver - were it not for the fact that I've chosen to torture Hilary even more by giving her twins? I have no idea. Interpret as you will.


End file.
